Has Mario Kart Evolved Enough in Recent Years?

Mario Kart is a well-loved Nintendo franchise which first graced us with its presence back in 1992 when it released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as Super Mario Kart. For the first time ever gamers could play as their favourite Italian plumper’s along with their huge cast of friends (and villains) in a fun kart racing experience. This game, much like the side scrolling Super Mario Bros Games (Nintendo Entertainment System 1985) took the early gaming community by storm and since then has continued to enrich gamers with consistent, entertaining fun experiences for them and their friends, I think it’s safe to say here that nearly all of us has had at least one Mario Kart experience in their gaming life’s.

The main concept for the game featured Mario and the gang competing in, you guessed it, kart racing fun as they try to best their opponents with their racing skill. However to shake the game up you could collect items boxes which would grant the player a random item to help them gain the upper hand and claim first place. From the slippery Banana peel to persistent red shell gamers have used their skills and cunning items to take part in a number of kart racing experiences with Mario and friends.

Since Super Mario Kart Nintendo has made up to seven Mario Kart sequels to their future main consoles or handheld devices usually rotating from a console game to a handheld one. Each game offered something new to keep the series fresh and exciting when it released. This made sure that the games didn’t drive themselves into the ground.

After Super Mario Kart we had Mario Kart 64 made for the Nintendo 64 (hence it’s title) and it introduced 4 player racing and 3D graphics for the first time. Mario Kart: Super Circuit was made for the Game Boy Advanced which allowed us to unlock retro tracks from previous games in the series. After this we got Mario Kart: Double Dash for the Nintendo Gamecube and allowed us to have two player karts along with co-op LAN play. Mario Kart DS was next which was released on the, you guessed it again, the Nintendo DS and focused on dual screen gameplay which was the main attraction for the newly released handheld. For the Nintendo Wii the company released Mario Kart: Wii (Do I smell a pattern here?), and featured bikes for the first time in the series and the consoles main feature; motion controls. The Nintendo 3DS was up next and Mario Kart 7 (Oh I guess not) gave us stereoscopic 3D graphics along with hand gliding and submersible karts. The final one (for now) was Mario Kart 8 released for the Nintendo Wii U and featured anti-gravity racing, not to mention was the first game to make Mario Kart HD title. Along with each instalment new characters were featured and starting from Double Dash you could unlock them over time.

Now at your first glance you’ll see a paragraph of each new game and their new features which will probably make you scroll up to look at the title only to think “Has this guy just countered his own article? Dumbass” which is kind of true but I wanted to show both sides and for people to understand that Nintendo have added new things to their new Mario Kart games and this blog was not an attack on them for not adding anything to their games. You know just to make sure and all as we all know what people are like when you take a big game and criticize it. So let’s not raise those pitchforks right now.

As a Mario Kart fan myself who has put a countless number of hours into the majority of titles Nintendo have released I came into Mario Kart 8 with high expectations with all the media buzz the game was receiving. At this point it was coming up to three years since Mario Kart 7 for the 3DS and a whopping six years since the last main console game, so even here you can tell that for any fan of the Mario Kart series it was an exciting time. The game then released and I got a Wii U at the time just for this game. Yup, Mario Kart 8 was the reason I decided to buy a Wii U and even went as far to pre order the Steelbook Edition of Mario Kart 8 from Amazon Germany while pre ordering the Mario Kart 8 Collector’s Edition (with the T-Shirt) from Nintendo’s online store.

After playing it for a few hours, mostly with my Nintendo Pro Controller, I came away a little disappointed and couldn’t believe the hype this game was getting. However I finally clicked on what was wrong and it wasn’t because the game was crap, poorly made, not solid or boring it was because despite Nintendo making another solid title, like most Nintendo games these days it felt like they hadn’t added enough to the game during the six year gap of their last console game. Mario Kart Wii’s big feature was motion controls while Mario Kart 8’s was anti-gravity racing, these were not the only features these games had but compared to the other ones the games both had these were the big ones, the biggest features Nintendo were showing off which made the game look new and exciting.

One of the problems I found was missing features. One of them was the step back the game took with a fan favourite multiplayer mode. Battle Arena was a mode which let gamers battle each other out in arena styled maps whether it was to pop each other’s balloons in one mode or to collect the most gold coins in the other. In Mario Kart 8 Nintendo decided, for some strange reason, to make the normal maps for the racing mode the main maps in battle mode. Gone were the awesome styled arenas which suited the battle modes main purpose instead gamers were left with maps taken from the standard racing mode. This felt, in my opinion that Nintendo ran out of time and decided to slap together some race maps from the standard mode and shoehorn them into the battle mode. This didn’t work out very well when gamers in battle mode found it hard to turn around because of the lack of room and instead had to go a full lap to go face to face with someone they wanted to hit with a recently picked up item. Fortunately for Nintendo reviews decided, for whatever reason, to glide past such a big thing which has been a huge part of Mario Kart since the very first Super Mario Kart game. In the end Nintendo should have taken a step forward with the Battle Arena mode and not a step back.

A missing feature altogether comes in the form of a Map Editor, a feature should which be gladly welcomed by a lot of Mario Kart fans as it would grant gamers the ability to create their very own Mario Kart maps and if Nintendo allows it upload them online to a Mario themed map community so other people can download them whether it’s to race in or for the Battle mode (kind of what have solved the problem above wouldn’t it?). A Map editor, in my opinion, is long overdue for Mario Kart these days and I hope Nintendo don’t decide to make a separate game out of it, this feature would be a worthy edition to Mario Kart as it would increase the replay value and features the game would have.

However my main problem lay on the games structure, it was almost exactly the same twenty two years on. Now you could say this about a lot of games but usually you would see a difference in a game which has been going for that long. You start up your game, you come to the loading screen, you select your mode, select your cup speed, select your character, then later games you select your kart/bike and finally you select what cup you want to race through. In the end for a franchise which has been going on for so long you expect something to be a little bit more different and for me I found the perfect kart racing game Nintendo should have borrowed inspiration from Diddy Kong Racing which was released on the Nintendo 64 the same year as the console version of Mario Kart.

Diddy Kong Racing was made by Rare back in their glory days before they were sold to Microsoft. The game featured Diddy Kong (obviously) and his friends along with Rare characters such as Conker the Squirrel and Banjo the Bear. Despite the game releasing at the end of the same year as Mario Kart it differed completely from it. Diddy Kong offered players the chance to ride in not only a kart but a plane and hovercraft things which Nintendo to this day haven’t really done unless you count gliding and submergible karts the same thing. The game also offered a completely new structure where instead of having the same boring menu to select your races on it offered a huge hub to explore with collectibles scattered around which you needed to the right vehicle to actually acquire them. To select your missions you would have to find doors to enter the race that’s not if you are busy having fun collecting the collectibles scattered around the start off hub. Yet despite all this that’s not all you could even select challenges to try and beat, for example you might be asked to collect seven silver coins and come in at first place to win the challenge.

However despite Diddy Kong being the game which offers a new look on what Mario Kart could borrowed inspiration from the real kart racing game Mario Kart should have took inspiration from years ago is Crash Team Racing, a game made by Naughty Dog on the rival system the PS1. This game was a first for Naughty Dog in the genre and despite some debate over the audio the game featured the game was fantastic, not only back then but even today. The game basically took the best from Mario Kart and Diddy Kong to make their own Kart racing game. For the structure of the game Naughty Dog decided to go with the open world hub but focused on kart vehicles only, where players can roam around the hub to select their missions. After completing four races a boss garage will be open where a boss character with challenge you to a one on one race however the boss will have a special trick up their sleeve to make the race a little bit harder for you. For example Ripper Roo on the first level will throw a number of TNT boxes at you while another boss with throw a number of N Brio's Beakers at you. Once you have defeated the boss you move onto the next part of the world until the entire hub is made available to you. Another cool feature was there was replay value in the races, you could go back and do a Time Trail for a Blue Relic or you could collect all the “CTR” tokens in the race to win a coloured gem to unlock gem races.

Diddy Kong Racing was released in 1997 while Crash Team Racing was released in 1999. Despite the fact Nintendo have released six Mario Kart titles they have never once thought about borrowing some gameplay elements from either one of these games. In a way it’s sad to see when an Adventure mode for Mario Kart is long overdue and could help make the franchise become even bigger. Nintendo have the entire Mushroom Kingdom at their fingertips and could make a hub out of any part of it, adding more of the hub on in future instalments. It’s not like they would ever run out of places to do hubs in with how big the Mario Universe is. By adding a hub it would replace the same structure they have added in their games for over two decades. Add some one on one boss races and replay value to the same races (Cup speed, time trails, some token feature like the “CTR”) and Mario Kart could be bigger than ever.

In conclusion it’s sad to see that with how much potential Mario Kart has Nintendo don’t really push themselves to add bigger features to their games which could freshen the series up even more then the smaller, less risky features they add in each new instalments. Sure they are well developed, solid games but when you have been making a game with roughly the same formula and add in some small, less risky features (even like their Super Mario Bros games) then it’s no wonder they are so very well made quality wise, they’ve perfected the craft for so long. I think it’s time Nintendo added some features found in other fantastic kart racing games from the 90s. The games are in development for a long time so it’s not like they wouldn’t have time to test and make these new features in future Mario Kart games. Hell it’s not like anyone is asking for a massive open world Mario game, a small hub full of secrets would be nice.

So should Mario Kart follow the same path with each new instalment adding in smaller, but safer, features or should Nintendo take a chance and add in some type of adventure mode with the Mushroom Kingdom in all its glory to explore as a hub. Discuss.